September 13, 2011
Read The Beat’s story on Craig Thompson‘s visit to The Center for Cartoon Studies as he kicked off the Habibi tour.
Craig Thompson was born in Michigan and grew up in a rural area of central Wisconsin. After two years of college he left the Midwest at the age of twenty-two to settle in Portland, Oregon. There he briefly worked in Dark Horse Comics’s design department, and in 1999 debuted with Good-bye, Chunky Rice from Top Shelf, which won a Harvey Award and was nominated for an Ignatz. Aside from two mini-comics, Thompson’s next work was nearly five times the length of the first: the massive Blankets, published in 2003, which earned him multiple Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz Awards, and broad critical praise ranging from TIME magazine to Art Spiegelman.
His avidly awaited follow-up, Habibi, weighs in at 672 pages and is due out in September from Pantheon. While Thompson has been working on the book since 2004, his occasional side projects have included designing Grammy-nominated artwork for the band Menomena (2007).
